AUTOMATIC 3-D SKELETON-BASED SEGMENTATION OF LIVER VESSELS FROM MRI AND CT FOR COUINAUD REPRESENTATION

Medical imaging systems as MRI and CT, provide useful information on the liver vascular network for surgical planning. However, manual segmentation is difficult and time consuming; an automatic procedure could thus help radiologists in their analysis. CT have been considered superior for hepatic vessels, but they are also visible in MRI, especially when a contrast agent is used. This study proposes an automatic 3-D skeleton-based segmentation for liver vessels. We identify vascular network to propose a segmentation of Couinaud anatomical segments. Experimental results show that the proposed method can segment liver vessels on both modalities with faithful 3-D representations.